John Croson's Blog Home

Importing CSV to MS SQL -or- Did I Do This Right?

2008-07-15T13:24:00.005-05:00

I was trying to find a quick and dirty method of exporting, and subsequently importing CSV data into MS SQL; programmatically.I'm dealing with rather small amounts of data, so this method may not work for many, but it Works For Me (tm).My source data comes from an AIX / uSQL box running Misys Tiger. Yes, I realize I could query that database directly, if I purchased the Transoft ODBC drivers for

Code highlighting in blogs

2008-07-01T11:49:00.000-05:00

I've looked around a bit for a utility for highlighting my code samples here on BlogSpot, and found a couple of useful tools. The first is code2html, which has been around for some time, and turns your perl, python and other types into pretty, formatted html. It works well, is CGI, but has some limits to its' implementation. Then I found a great swiss-army knife of a utility, called

NPI Search Redundancy

2008-07-01T09:56:00.010-05:00

Most healthcare professionals know at this point that all providers of health care, require NPI (National Provider Identifier) numbers. Without one, it will become increasingly difficult for claims to be paid by commercial payers, and impossible to collect medicare and medicaid payments. Since we are a coding/billing/collection/management agency, we have frequented the NPPES (National Plan &

The Best News Archive Reader

2008-06-14T09:55:00.000-05:00

Wow, talk about a news reader on steroids... I happened to stumble upon this VERY cool news reader. From their site, the quick description: MarkMail lets you search millions of emails across thousands of mailing listsSearch using keywords as well as from:, subject:, extension:, and list: constraintsThe GUI doesn't yet expose it, but you can negate any search item, like -subject:

GoDaddy is blocking my mail....

2008-06-09T12:35:00.000-05:00

Well, NOW I know why I've not gotten any mail from my recent subscription to the R:Base mailing list. GoDaddy must be blocking these, as I've not received one, but after signing up via my Gmail account, 2 have hit my inbox. Turns out if you perform a search on "GoDaddy email issues" you will get many results. *sigh* I thought we'd get decent hosting out of them, but this is just unacceptable.

I'm convinced I AM the only person...

2008-06-03T20:39:00.000-05:00

...in this hemisphere that is using R:Base. Although I'm sure if the other person using it reads this, I'll get flamed. I've posted a comment to the "mailing list", and have further convinced myself I'm the only one, next to the list admin, that has subscribed to this list, as my post rendered no comments, and I've not received any messages over a 72 hour period. Since this version (6.5) has

R:Base makes my eyes bleed

2008-05-30T18:36:00.001-05:00

I've been tasked this week to review an R:Base database that is used to parse data from one of our clients, and output it into a usable form for our Misys Tiger server. It's had many little menu items added to it to perform data manipulation over the years, and never really been used to it's full potential. I'm more of a VBA/VB guy, and would rather get this done using Access, but only have a

Wow, I fell for a Phishing scheme

2008-05-11T13:03:00.001-05:00

I'm soooo embarrassed about this, but compelled to share it. I have an eBay account, like many of us do, which is linked to PayPal, which in turn is linked to my bank account. My wife and I share my eBay account, because it seems to make sense, since we share everything else in our lives. Today she was checking her email, and it was from eBay, with a message about some item she bid on, and

Symantec Endpoint Protection...again

2008-04-29T14:21:00.004-05:00

Wow. I've really had LOTS of hits generated on this blog, since I posted some info about SEPM and my related issues, so I've decided to share some tips and other interesting findings. My guess is that many of you that hit my blog don't have the luxury of having a DEV environment to test in, so PLEASE do yourself a favor, and if you do nothing else, follow #7 and #8. This will prevent you from

2.5 Days to uninstall Symantec Endpoint Protection client

2008-04-18T14:34:00.001-05:00

So today I'm trying to clean up a Symantec Endpoint Protection client install that went bad, and here's what I get during the uninstall process... Is it really gonna take this long? Can I make a pot of coffee stretch that far? Will my kids start college before this completes? In truth, this quickly went to 11 M$ minutes, then to 1 M$ minute. First time I've EVER seen anything like that before.

SmugMug was my choice

2008-04-13T08:02:00.001-05:00

I'd done quite a bit of research into online photo sharing sites, and found SmugMug to be the best option. I won't go into granular details of feature differences, because there seems to be to many to wade through. I did however, use this site for feature comparisons. The final two determining factors were price and whether there was a clear way my data was backed up. Nowhere on dotPhoto's site

Symantec Endpoint Protection...blech

2008-04-10T21:55:00.005-05:00

My SEPM server decided to do the BSOD the other night, at about 2:00am. Nice. Right when a few users from India were working on the server, which also happens to be our Terminal Server. Thankfully, I didn't get a call. I can't wait until MR2 comes out. Some of the touted improvements is a lighter weight processor footprint, fixed graphics (mine ALWAYS work at the console, just not remotely...),

Leveraging Microsoft Indexing Service in the Enterprise

2008-04-07T08:51:00.015-05:00

There are quite a few tutorials on the internet about Indexing Service, but I found none that showed me all of what I planned to accomplish in my environment. This prompted me to write this HowTo. Microsoft's description of it is "Indexing Service is a base service for Microsoft® Windows® 2000 or later that extracts content from files and constructs an indexed catalog to facilitate efficient and

Word and VBA Forms

2008-04-04T08:23:00.002-05:00

This Word document was developed to manage our claims follow-up process, and control the way our staff filled out these claim letters. When this document opens, it displays a form for the user to fill in, and: Reads in a text file used to populate a Combo Box for the user to select a company name (our clients). This file is on a network share. See commented code for details. Checks active

Misys Tiger Financial Analysis Report Parsing using Excel

2008-04-03T10:20:00.001-05:00

This report is run regularly to check for duplicate patient DOS visits. If you have Tiger, you can use the parameters at the bottom of the sample report to see how ours is built. As usual, the PHI (Patient Health Information) has been changed, but not the format. Download the spreadsheet and sample file to view the results. The VBA is commented fairly well, so it should be pretty easy to follow

Misys PM Refund List Parser

2008-04-02T07:45:00.007-05:00

This Excel spreadsheet takes text from Refund List reports in Misys PM (AIX Version) and generates a nicely formatted check register. You can't see it, because it's hidden behind the "form". After the import of the data, it is revealed. This simply doesn't do one sheet, and "that's all you get". It will allow you to save your results, and come back to a report later and import it, adding to the

PLC Data Collection

2008-04-02T07:03:00.002-05:00

I had a client when I worked for techWorks that is an industrial bakery. Mmmmm, the smell of butter spindles still makes my mouth water....wait, I digress. Again. They had purchased a disposal system that would weigh and dump their bad batches of goods, or poor mixes, etc. While it conformed to EPA standards, they also needed and wanted a method of determining what production line the waste came

Homegrown Remote Assistance

2008-04-01T08:54:00.005-05:00

Back in 2004, we were looking for a cheap way of providing remote desktop support to our customers. This would serve a few purposes: Reducing or eliminating trip charges to the customers.Providing instant support to our customers. Reducing the cost to my employer who was paying us mileage.Using a ShuttleBox as a server, I set about installing FreeBSD and configuring vncserver to run in a sort of

Security Audits

2008-03-31T14:37:00.008-05:00

Late 2005 I was working for a consulting company in the Milwaukee area. In an attempt to continue to move from a break-fix environment to a more proactive, managed IT approach, I was asked to develop a security audit methodology, which we would use in conjunction with our "taste-test" approach to new customers. A taste-test was really nothing more than an engineer and a salesman showing a

Symantec Endpoint Protection...is a PIG

2008-03-31T13:20:00.000-05:00

I just spent the last few days troubleshooting a Symantec Endpoint Protection migration from Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition v10.x. What an effort. Much like the last time I upgraded a client from 9 to 10. They conviently forgot to include "May bring your older, underpowered workstations to their KNEES." in the product description. That client had about 25 workstations that were old HP

More Work, Please.

2008-03-28T10:05:00.003-05:00

I've been working quite hard at my new job at Integrated Healthcare Business Solutions. Just a small list of what I've been doing in that time: Migrate Windows 2000 Domain to 2k3, which required:New Server and SAN setup.Migrate Aquarius Document Imaging IIS application and SQL databases to new server. Migrate Data to new server.Heavily modify GPO's for new environment.Deploy WSUS for new

The Smoke and Mirrors of Server Upgrades

2008-03-26T21:39:00.002-05:00

This past semester I had to write a paper for my Technical Reporting class that dealt with communicating technical topics to non-technical persons. This was my attempt. Read this doc on Scribd: Final GuideThe Smoke and Mirrors of Server Upgrades Prepared by John Croson Contents Introduction ...........................................................

Scripting...

2007-10-26T16:58:00.000-05:00

I've been putting together a lot of automation in the way of login/logout scripts, and documenting on our company Intranet that I put together [FlexWiki.com]. Here are the scripts. UPLOAD.BAT Location: F:\DATA\DOWNLOAD\OUTPUT. Explanation: Used by persons scrubbing data to upload to Misys server and change permissions for interfacing purposes. Without this script, the files would not be set

Personality Evaluation

2007-10-18T10:49:00.000-05:00

Today I took a personality evaluation, through a company my employer uses for recruiting staff. I thought the results were spot on: Summary John, your responses indicate that you are steady, conscientious and mild-mannered. You persistently work toward achieving accuracy, and you show a great deal of interest in issues concerning what you feel is right versus wrong. You are a loyal and

VMWare is cool!

2006-12-03T07:35:00.000-06:00

My first implementation of VMWare in a test environment, went quite smooth. I was pleased to see the installer resembled that of RedHat or Fedora. Very comforting, warm, fuzzy feelings came over me as I ran the install script...;) I installed a Windows 2003 member server, and a Nagios sample image found on the VMWare website. Quite easy to install guest os's and especially the images, as no